3
points
HillRat
Joined 5,672 karma
- You have the same problem that you have with legal LLMs; an LLM is incapable of providing legal or regulatory-involved advice, and anyone using an LLM for such purposes (even leaving aside hallucinations) forfeits any justifiable reliance defense. There's a role for LLMs, but no one with legal responsibility over reporting could or would possibly rely on an LLM for complex regulatory and rules analysis, not when there's the risk of your wardrobe being replaced with orange jumpsuits.
- That’s not because of the FDA, that’s because of CEPS. If the USG negotiated drug prices the way France does, there’d be far less disparity in average pricing. (Given the continual litany of safety, efficacy, and dosage control issues with imported drugs, FDA isn’t regulating them enough, largely because the inspection budget just isn’t there.)
- Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
Reporting and editorial are separate units in newspapers; the point being made is that, while reporting continues to properly disclose potential ownership conflicts of interest, editorial and op-ed, following Bezos taking direct control of them, are not doing so.
Of course, the Post is Bezos' toy, and there's no law that says he can't use editorial as a megaphone for his personal interests without disclosing them (or, in fact, even use the reporting side for the same purpose!), but you can't do that and still claim that the paper has any of the Grahams' pedigree left in it, and this is very much a change from Bezos' earlier ownership, in which he largely stayed hands-off on editorial decisions.
- Sign the package with hard keys and signature.
That's really the core issue. Developer-signed packages (npm's current attack model is "Eve doing a man-in-the-middle attack between npm and you," which is not exactly the most common threat here) and a transparent key registry should be minimal kit for any package manager, even though all, or at least practically all, the ecosystems are bereft of that. Hardening API surfaces with additional MFA isn't enough; you have to divorce "API authentication" from "cryptographic authentication" so that compromising one doesn't affect the other.
- One thing is that a lot of economic activity was front-loaded to the first few quarters as businesses scrambled to get inventory on board ahead of tariffs; now we're seeing companies having burned through inventory, so inflationary impacts are going to start working their way through the supply chain now in earnest, and we're going to see a concomitant slowdown in economic activity as that acts as a persistent drag across multiple sectors. In practice you're looking at something equivalent to a 3-4% federal sales tax on all purchases, but keep an eye on where it falls on relatively inelastic goods, which will have an outsize effect on consumer finances.
- Not gonna spend PACERbux on this to find out, but not sure how they’re arguing there’s an actual case or controversy to rule on, since no one’s trying to domesticate a judgment against them in the US. This is just an attempt to preemptively weaponize the US courts against the UK government, good chance it gets bounced for lack of jurisdiction.
- Packer and ag consolidation is a huge problem, but the underlying issue here is climate change and long-lasting droughts; some of the issues with herd size — the smallest since about 1950 — come from COVID hangover when cows weren’t getting processed and price-per-head plummeted, but the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed. We’re looking at long-term cost trends that are unlikely to reverse or even be significantly ameliorated anytime soon.
- The class B bonds paid roughly 11% over LIBOR, so about 40% over three years, against the risk of a viral outbreak for five different families, defined as At least two countries experiencing at least 250 fatal cases increasing over twelve weeks, so the trigger did not have to be as globally-significant as COVID-19 turned out to be. That’s a pretty aggressive coupon, but the chance of a regional outbreak was also pretty high.
- It's been interesting watching who actually places rule of law and liberty above partisanship -- the Cheneys, tellingly, or Bill Kristol, or the Cato Institute -- and who has cheerfully befouled every declared principle they held in the name of untrammeled power. There are a number of law professors who talked a good game about common law liberty when the bad guy was the EPA, but signed on with Trump I and II the second they realized that tyranny was going to work in favor of their chosen policy preferences. Deeply dispiriting.
- Genuinely curious what legal waivers they’ve been afforded, since generally speaking “holding a decision-making position in the part of the uniformed services you also sell to” is very much adjacent to profiteering and disturbingly in the vicinity to honest services fraud. How do you disentangle private interests from the public good, even if these guys are operating in good faith?
Also, give a brief thought to those troops who signed on for their full hitch to defend their country and get to watch a handful of politically-connected billionaires leapfrog their way into custom-built field grade slots without having to attend basic or OCS, or even pass APFT.
- It looks like the military being deployed on rioters
Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting," the United States has robust Constitutional, common-law and statutory guardrails against the use of the military domestically. The US military cannot, absent an insurrection in which regular legal order cannot be maintained, be deployed against US residents. The use of the military in the past has been limited to what were deemed by federal and state officials full insurrections (e.g., the Whiskey Rebellion), or, in the civil rights era, in response to governors affirmatively refusing to enforce the law regarding an end to segregation and the integration of public institutions. In this case we have state and local officials explicitly stating that the factual predicates of an insurrection aren't being satisfied (the protests cover a few square blocks in a metropolitan area that by itself is larger than Lebanon or Kosovo, in a state larger than Japan or Sweden). While courts traditionally give deference to executive determinations of this sort, they aren't beyond judicial review, and this is (I would argue) clearly pretextual.
What we're seeing here, conversely, is an attempt to sidestep this clear principle through not-particularly-clever tricks and semantic gamesmanship; for example, mobilizing Marines to "protect federal property," but then DHS officially asking DOD to give active duty forces arrest power. This is clearly unconstitutional and illegal, but, as with much we've seen recently, the hope appears to be that if you change the facts on the ground quickly enough, the clear illegality of the actions can be ignored.
In addition, the federalization of a state National Guard against the will of the state is unprecedented; I don't know of any previous example of this happening. In the American system, even though the National Guard is a vestige of the old state militias, it's clear that the states are at least assumed to have plenary authority over their own forces absent an invasion or insurrection.
- The problem here is that all software development (excepting that done for hire) is classified as R&D. The software developer working on your Wordpress or Magento site (and arguably the accountant building a spreadsheet, to take the statute at face value) isn't an operational expense, they're now an R&D expense that has to be amortized and can't be taken as an expense against revenue. Previously, this was an optional choice (and many large and mature companies were amortizing anyway), but under the current tax treatment it's required, which essentially turns early-stage startups into cash bonfires, given how many small companies don't make it to year five.
- She’s a magistrate judge, she’s handling discovery matters, not the substantive issues at trial; the plaintiffs are specifically alleging spoliation by OpenAI/Microsoft (the parties were previously ordered to work out discovery issues, which obviously didn’t happen) and the judge is basically ensuring that potentially-discoverable information is retained, though it may not actually be discoverable in practice (or require a special master). It’s a wide-ranging order, but in this case that’s probably indicative of the judge believing that the defendants have been acting in bad faith, particularly since she specifically asked them for an amelioration plan which they appear to have refused to provide.
- One thing about Andor is that Gilroy specifically encouraged the directors not to shoot a lot of coverage and focus instead on very intentional shot lists, which both sped up shooting (critical given the cost of the production, COVID requirements, and the Hollywood strikes) and resulted in a much more crafted look, though it required a lot of detailed up-front planning. It’s really quite striking how different that approach is from the usual way things are shot, edited, and cleaned these days.
- I think the fundamentalist Christian radicalism is more a comorbidity of the West Coast Straussian obsession of the place than a primary focus; nonetheless, the school is pretty much the funnel into the DC Trump echelons, and the students are politically radicalized to the degree one would expect from a Liberty or a Bob Jones, rather than, say, a GMU or even Washington-Lee. (It also has essentially zero STEM footprint — I believe one, maybe two comp sci professors, for example — and its liberal arts curriculum is, to put it mildly, somewhat outside the mainstream of every discipline represented.)
- Still to this day the largest single line item I’ve ever signed off on; I have an old varsity jacket in the back of my closet that was their sales swag for the E10K. Still not convinced that it was that much more cost-effective than a bunch of E6500s for our (embarrassingly parallel) workload, but it was an impressive bit of kit!
- 1 point
- Flip side of this is that every one of these regulatory rollbacks will get challenged in court as arbitrary and capricious (after all, no more Chevron), reinstated by the next Democratic administration anyway, and possibly not even be functionally repealed (creating potential liability down the road), so at least for a while manufacturers will probably continue to act as if the standards are still in effect.
This, of course, is exactly the kind of chaos and uncertainty that the APA and all those agency processes are supposed to prevent, but it’s a roller coaster for the next few years at least.
- Obama wasn't allowed to keep his Blackberry; he requested a secure commercial-quality cellphone to communicate with his aides, and NSA (which was, to be sure, not really happy about the request) selected the Blackberry as their platform. The end solution was a highly pared-down device that could only communicate via a hosted encryption server (a commercial product, SecurVoice) to a small number of paired devices, which were distributed to Obama's inner circle. The Presidential devices had additional security limitations (e.g., they could only connect to WHCA-controlled base stations). End of the day, what they had was an encrypted closed network of devices, some of which communicated over public wireless infra, running a very limited, NSA-reviewed, approved, and altered, software suite.
What's clear is that NSA put a fair amount of effort into securing and maintaining that system, so much that its use was limited to the White House; Hillary Clinton wanted a similar setup (her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, had been allowed to use unaltered "off the shelf" Blackberries under an NSA waiver, but NSA had declined to renew those waivers due to security concerns), but NSA slow-walked and effectively derailed the discussions with State's security team, perhaps because they wanted to limit the amount of technical detail discussed outside the White House, or because they were concerned that State would be unable to provide SecState with the kind of technical support necessary to secure the devices during global travel. (We all know what happened next, of course.)
- There's no coherence here, the people coming up with this policy are either ignorant or incompetent to the point of malice (Navarro, AKA "Ron Vara," being the benchmark). Tariffs, when used judiciously, can help support "infant industries" where domestic investment in emerging technologies means that supply constraints are less of a concern and where there are long-run expectations of lower domestic prices through efficiencies. In some cases, targeted punitive sanctions (against dumping policies, or to enforce labor and environmental standards) make sense, but the economic evidence on efficacy is mixed.
There is somewhat of an argument that countries such as China overuse American consumption as a crutch for development, rather than stimulating domestic consumption (Xi has, to give very mild credit, proposed policies to increase domestic demand); tariffs would certainly force countries and trade blocs to focus on non-American consumption, though this is a bit like losing weight by removing the patient's esophagus.
What we're seeing here is just ridiculous, from an economic perspective. Low-cost low-margin manufacturing is not coming back to the US, absent an economic crisis that pushes down to a upper-middle-income-level state (stay tuned!), while putting tariffs on agricultural products simply ensures that consumers will pay more without a corresponding increase in domestic competition (how many pineapples does the US grow?). The "calculation" of the tariffs, such as it is, is simply a tax on comparative advantage, which is mercantilist nonsense we left behind centuries ago. There's no steelman for this; even if there were, the increase in raw material costs would make the steelman unaffordable for us both.
- There are already ways to enforce those -- for example, Democrats and US labor unions used the USMCA negotiations to enact a "facility specific rapid response mechanism" that lets the US essentially strong-arm Mexico and Mexican companies into improving collective bargaining rights within the context of the trade deal; section 307 products (created by forced labor) have been illegal since 1930 (and enforced more strictly over the past decade, given concerns about Chinese slave labor); carbon import taxes addressing environmental regulations have been proposed in Congress, but haven't been implemented yet. The government also has existing authorities under anti-dumping and countervailing duty (ADD/CVD) legislation, so long as those duties comply with American obligations under international treaties (Trump's tariffs exist outside the ADD/CVD framework, and place the US in noncompliance relative to our WTO obligations).
Trump's tariffs don't really serve any specific policy goals other than "trade is bad and everyone should buy more from us than we buy from them," which is self-evidently absurd; why are we punishing Madagascar because we buy their vanilla and they're too poor to have extensive need of our services-based economy? Beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies inevitably beggar us as well, as we're likely to find out quite soon.
- During "snowmageddon" and similar winter outages fossil fuel shoulder load also broke down, since the dynamic pricing market doesn't pay to keep spinning capacity, and the plants couldn't start up, which is why the cost curves went berserk: the price pressure escalated to try and incentivize production, but the production wasn't to be had. (The JIT nature of Texas LNG logistics also played its part; some gas turbines would have been able to start up, but couldn't get LNG to do so.)
Absent turning the Texas energy market into a more rational design (I was part of the energy market during dereg, these failures were predicted by our energy economists at the time), the state should mandate weatherization for wind generation at a minimum, and look into grid-scale battery requirements as prices fall and technologies mature.
Solar and wind are fantastic opportunistic power generators that work well together and should be a significant part of any grid's energy mix going forward, but the state needs to act like every other power market and pay for spinning fossil fuel capacity for shoulder and peak demand. Picking energy mix winners and losers is just political meddling in what was supposed to be a free market environment.
- Roman Stoicism, of the sort practiced by Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and tendentious sanctimony; Seneca’s insistence that virtue is detached from worldly goods is somewhat undermined by his corrupt exploitation of his station, for example. Stoicism qua stoicism was, like all Roman intellectual pursuits, originally Greek, and was based on an entire metaphysics of free-will determinism that the Romans pretty much ignored in favor of being able to pretend that they were upholding the supposed virtues of an imagined past (a favored pastime, see Tacitus and Cicero), even as they let their society slide ever further into corruption and tyranny. To be honest, Stoicism tells us a lot about the psychological and social character of the Romans, but didn’t really come into its own as an influential philosophy until its early modern rediscovery and the development of neo-Stoicist thought.
It's exceedingly unlikely that this survives any administrative or legal scrutiny (and if it does, there's a whole lot of former active-status Trump allies, including GOFOs, who are more than vulnerable under these same standards); the main result, I think, is to elevate Kelly's political profile while turning most of the Pentagon even more against Hegseth and Phelan (the former being an over-promoted PAO, and the latter not even having that experience, having spent his career managing Michael Dell's money).